19.6.1 About Approvals

The approvals component allows Oracle APEX to create tasks for user approval.

The APEX Approvals Component is a toolkit for implementing human approvals into your application. It contains infrastructure that streamlines setting up human approvals. Because the approvals component contains a data model, when you configure human approvals, you focus on the details and customization for a specific type of approval.

You can set up task approvers and administrators at design time or determine them dynamically at runtime based on data related to the task.

APEX provides building blocks for approvals:

• Task Definition - A shared component used to configure task parameters, participants, actions, and due dates.
• Unified Task List - A page type in the Create Page Wizard, used to create a summary of tasks that functions like an inbox.
• Task Details Page - A page that shows details for a specific task, which can include metadata, history, comments, and actions.
• Human Task - Create and Human Task - Manage - Page processes that create and act on task instances in your pages.
• APEX_APPROVAL - A package API for creating, retrieving, and managing tasks programmatically.

By customizing these building blocks, you can create an approval process specific to your application, or shared across many applications. Once you create the task definition, unified task list, and task details page, you add the task definition to a page as a Human Task - Create page process. When the process activates, the approvals engine creates the task from the task definition.

Users can view and take action on their tasks in the unified task list. Based on the user action, the Task State changes. For more on task states, see About Task States and Transitions.

Tip:

If a user initiates a task, they cannot approve that same task. The initiator of the task and the owner of the task must be different.